Tagged with renewable energy

Wood pellets proposed to replace coal used by thermal power stations

A renewable replacement for black coal burned in thermal power stations could be made by converting Tasmanian plantation wood into a pelletised biomass fuel.

Private equity firm New Forests has started a $5 million feasibility study into a $130 million wood pellet plant for Tasmania’s Tamar Valley.

If approved, New Forests’ hardwood plantation subsidiary, Forico, would supply 100 per cent FSC-certified plantation hardwood and softwood to the bioenergy pellet plant, according to Forico chief executive Bryan Hayes.

Black energy-dense biomass pellets could be used to replace black coal.

Black energy-dense biomass pellets could be used to replace black coal.

“These pellets are able to go into an existing power plant without any modifications whatsoever,” Mr Hayes said.

“These black pellets will directly substitute for thermal coal in existing black coal-fired power plants in Japan.

The proposal involves making an energy-dense black wood pellet from sawmill residues and woodchips milled to less than 5mm in size.

Mr Hayes said if wood particles were exposed to heat and pressure, the cell structure could be broken down.

He said steam could be used to ‘cook’ the wood particles at 200 degrees Celsius under 20 atmospheres of pressure. The material could then be forced through an extrusion plate to form a high density, water-repellent pellet replacement for fossil fuel.

Mr Hayes said the feasibility study would look at the technology needed to manufacture at least 225,000 tonnes of the black biomass pellets a year in Tasmania. The study also would assess the commercial viability of establishing the black pellet plant on a disused woodchip export mill site at Long Reach.

“If it’s not commercially viable it won’t happen,” Mr Hayes said.

Mr Hayes said when the feasibility study was completed in March, New Forests would progress quickly if the project stacked up. He said after applying for environmental approval from the Government, construction could start as early as the middle of 2017.

“We would hope the plant could be constructed and ready for first operation in December 2018,” Mr Hayes said.

Read more.

How New Systems Can Make The World A Greener Place

Global energy consumption has grown steadily over the past century. This trend, driven by population and economic growth, is set to continue in spite of rising efficiency of both production and consumption. The IEA estimates that over the period to 2035 the investment required each year to supply the world’s energy needs will rise steadily to $2,000 billion.

In response to new opportunities such as renewable energy and smart technologies – and new policy goals – to reduce emissions and extend energy access, Distributed Energy Systems (DES) encompasses a diverse array of generation, storage, energy monitoring and control solutions. DES technologies represent a paradigm shift and offer building owners and energy consumers significant opportunities to reduce cost, improve reliability and secure additional revenue through on-site generation and dynamic load management.

The numbers speak for themselves. Operational cost reductions ranging between 8% and 28% and a return on investment (ROI) between 3-7 years compared to a business as usual are observed. CO2emissions are reduced at similar scales, with wider uptake delivering significant economic, social and environmental co-benefits through better system resilience and efficiency, including lower cost grid balancing, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and affordable extension of grids to unconnected communities.

city-stock-image

Improving Security Of Energy Supply & Resilience

Energy infrastructure all over the world is ageing and requires significant investment to replace and repair. The risks associated with such ageing assets coupled with shocks derived from large scale weather related events, could lead to potential failures in the network or poor environmental compliance.

Local, decentralised and controllable DES generation and storage sources can be designed to provide the end user with local resilience or even full independence from the grid. The benefits accrue to grid operators as well: DES can manage demand to reduce peak loads when infrastructure is nearing capacity, thus postponing the need for major grid reinforcement investments.

Energy Cost Reduction

Low but uncertain oil prices not only make overall energy costs unpredictable but increase risk on large investments in energy system upgrades, potentially obstructing the requirements of the end consumer. DES can be customized to match the consumer’s requirements as well as enabling actors to shape local generation and consumption in response to market price signals to achieve the lowest overall cost of energy.

Low Carbon Energy And Energy Efficiency

DES includes renewable and low carbon generation and controls that enable the integration of such technologies into the network and as a result reduces the carbon intensity and impact on the local environment of the energy system.

At a local level, poor air quality can proliferate acute public health problems. DES that rely on clean energy generation or hybrid systems, have a reduced impact on air quality and helps maintain a greener and cleaner ecosystem.

Read more.

Rushing to renewable energy targets puts sector’s reputation at risk

The last time an entire state blacked out was on the night the Beatles arrived in Sydney in 1964. So what happened in South Australia last week was rare and the repercussions could be vast.

The key question is whether that state’s heavy reliance on wind turbines might have increased the risk of a state-wide blackout. More broadly, the event will supercharge concerns over how renewable energy is being integrated into a national grid that was not designed to cope with it.

Wind presents two problems. First, it is intermittent, so all of it has to be backed up by baseload power for those days when the wind does not blow.

The second is a diabolically tricky engineering problem. For an electricity network to function, demand and supply have to be kept in the perfect harmony of 50 hertz every second of every day. If the frequency gets out of tune, the system identifies a fault that could destroy it and that trips the shutdown switch.

This electrical harmony is called synchronous supply, and thermal power is very good at delivering it to the grid.

Just under half of South Australia's energy is generated by wind and solar.

Just under half of South Australia’s energy is generated by wind and solar.

Premier Jay Weatherill said the primary cause of the state-wide outage was the storm’s destruction of transmission towers and that the National Electricity Market “did what it was supposed to do” — tripped the off switch to protect itself.

But what that switch was doing was protecting the east coast from the fluctuations of power in the west, it was not protecting South Australia.

Once the door to the east was shut, South Australia fell back on its own power supply, which, this report suggests, might by then have had a wildly fluctuating power supply and insufficient synchronous generation to keep it in check. That could explain why, region-by-region, the entire network shut itself down until the state went to black.

It might not be what happened but the report suggests this could have been the cause.

It is important to note that the Australian Energy Market Operator says the damage to the system was so catastrophic that it would have shut down no matter what the energy mix was in South Australia last week.

“Initial investigations have identified the root cause of the event is likely to be the multiple loss of 275 kilovolt (kV) power lines during severe storm activity in the state,” it said in a statement.

“These transmission lines form part of the backbone of South Australia’s power system and support supply and generation north of Adelaide,”.

But the statement adds: “The reason why a cascading failure of the remainder of the South Australia network occurred is still to be identified and is subject to further investigation.”

And that is the crucial question.

What is not in doubt is the next problem, rebooting the system. And that cannot be done with asynchronous power. To get the system online again, the energy market operator ordered the gas-fired power generator at Pelican Point to fire up, and then set about restarting the system bit by bit.

The blackout of an entire state is a major crisis. Politicians should know that you should never waste one. Renewables are the future but, today, they present serious engineering problems. To deny that is to deny the science.

Those problems can be sorted in time, but rushing to a target to parade green credentials exposes the electricity network to a serious security risk and, in the long run, risks permanent reputational damage to the renewable energy cause.

The grid is being transformed, and that transformation needs to be managed sensibly, or the entire nation might go to black.

Read more.

Does rapid renewables expansion mean higher electricity prices?

Perhaps one of the many points coming out of the Grattan Institute’s latest report is the idea that rapid expansion of renewable capacity must necessarily mean higher electricity prices. But what has been the experience in Europe over the last five years during which there has been a rapid expansion of renewable capacity in most European countries?

The Council of European Regulators compiles useful information on retail and wholesale electricity prices. Here is a table compiled from their data, which shows their estimate of average wholesale electricity prices (in Euros per MWh) in 2008/9 and 2014 in various European countries.

energy-price-declines

The table above show substantial price declines. It might be argued in response that since gas is the marginal fuel in most countries, this is reflecting the impact of lower gas prices over this period. Maybe, but that is not the whole story. The rapid expansion of renewables has also driven declines in wholesale prices.

This is well documented and the last few years has seen many venerable European power houses split themselves into the energy equivalent of a “good bank” and a “bad bank”, with the carbon-intensive generators sequestrated in the “bad bank” to manage their decline, and the “good bank” freed of the dead-weight to capitalise on the huge opportunities in renewables.

The rapid expansion of renewables in Australia may, as in Europe, not necessarily translate into higher electricity prices. Instead the expansion of renewables may be funded in large part by the wealth rushing out from carbon intensive electricity production. Carbon intensive producers will of course not like this, but reducing emissions must mean that it is not profitable to produce them, there can be no two ways about it.  In fact, to the extent that it does not occur this way in Australia, policy makers, consumers and the community might ask why.

Read more.

Move to clean energy requires smart policy

The phrase “sovereign risk” is used liberally in Australian public debate, most often in relation to established industries that may be affected by change in federal and state policy. But few have suffered as much as the still-establishing renewable energy sector, which has had to deal with constant chopping and changing in government thinking since the turn of the century.

This has particularly been the case since the election of the Abbott Coalition government in 2013. With an axe hanging over the renewable energy target and the abolition of the Labor-Greens carbon pricing scheme, there was a 70 per cent decline in clean energy investment.

In a welcome development, this is beginning to change. Both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg have strongly backed the existing target, roughly equivalent to 23 per cent of clean energy by 2020, and the long-term growth of the sector. But this should just be the start. Australia’s energy system is badly in need of an overhaul. The decentralised system has served the country well, driving the development of the prosperous economy we have enjoyed for generations and now take for granted. But it is a system designed for the last century, and in recent years its limitations have been exposed.

In terms of electricity, nearly half the amount consumers pay on their inflated quarterly bills covers the costs of extraordinary spending on networks over the past decade. Much of this investment was not needed: the poles and wires of the national electricity grid have been gold-plated far beyond what is required to ensure our lights stay on.

The system is also highly damaging to the planet. Burning cheap, wet brown coal for electricity in Victoria’s power plants comes at a vast indirect cost in the damage caused by the heat-trapping greenhouse gas they emit.

There are valid arguments for the government to intervene to ensure an orderly closure of coal plants, but the biggest shift is likely to be forced by allowing and encouraging the growth of a revamped system that is increasingly decentralised. With the rapidly falling cost of solar power and improvements in battery storage, this is now within grasp. This is a future in which households become “prosumers” – both producers and consumers. It requires changes to the national grid to become a much more fluid market, favouring consumers as much as energy companies. Households and businesses should be able to buy and sell electricity on the national grid at the best prices.

The benefits: the system becomes more efficient, with less energy wasted in transmission; the cost of infrastructure is low; and there is a greater incentive to reduce energy wastage.

There is a role for governments in driving this change. Other nations are far ahead of Australia – witness Denmark where, since the 1980s, public policy has encouraged cogeneration of electricity and heat for apartment buildings and businesses, producing an efficient decentralised system.

Read more.